"Visualising Affect Using Virtual Reality"

About the Authors

Polly Card is Senior Video Producer at San Diego State University. She is currently working towards a Ph.D in Education with SDSU/CGU focusing on visual research, race and gender. Pollycard.com

Michelle Ruiz is an instructional designer at the University of California Berkeley. Currently, she is focused on the UC-Mexico Initiative: she designs binational online courses with faculty from University of California and the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research interests include issues of equity and binational collaboration in online higher education. Her personal website can be found at mixelle.net.

Contents

Introduction

Context

Positionality & Rationale

Experiencing the World From A New Perspective

The Film

The Film Cont.

Works Cited

Context

This virtual reality film was produced in the wake of America’s 2016 presidential election. The divisive nature of Trump’s campaign demonstrated all too clearly how Latinx are perceived as criminals in American Society. In his presidential announcement speech, Trump stated “Mexico sends it people [to America] . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The students we interviewed shared how important it was to succeed in a society despite the negative stereotypes that marginalize and alienate them from opportunities, particularly in education.

As educators, we often don’t have the time or space to reflect on the experience of our students beyond the classroom and equally as important, the ideologies that inform our classroom practice. According to Alfaro & Bartolome (in press), a concerted effort must be made to prepare educators, including those who speak their students’ native languages and members of similar cultural backgrounds, to challenge negative ideologies and implement culturally relevant and holistic practices proactively to prevent the discriminatory manifestation of such ideologies (p. 2). How do we implement practices to ensure that teachers implement anti-deficit ideologies?

Currently there are very few opportunities for us to immerse ourselves in visual media that inspire us to appreciate teaching and learning from a student's perspective. This is why we built the Ideological Clarity Machine (ICM), a collaboration between students, researchers, artists, filmmakers, and educators resulting in an interactive virtual reality film that explores the experiences of a male community college student that lives a transborder lifestyle in the San Diego/Tijuana border area.

There is a student population that is often invisible to educators and campus leaders in the San Diego/Tijuana border area. This population of students experiences a transborder lifestyle. In the 1990s, the term "transborder" emerged in literature to describe the movement of transnational migrant populations (Ojeda, 1994). The term has helped to understand the experiences of students who frequently travel across the world’s busiest international border located along the edges of Tijuana and San Diego. Families facing economic hardships reside in Tijuana because the city provides lower living costs and the opportunity to maintain cultural and familial ties. Therefore, transborder students live in binational fluidity. They attend school in the United States and reside or constantly travel to Mexico. They embody two cultures, navigate two different social environments, and many times undergo a hostile border environment. For those students who cross the border every school day, these experiences are not recognized by institutions because students face legal and financial repercussions if their public institutions discover they reside in Tijuana.

In addition to all the nuances of crossing the border, transborder students’ identities are influenced by the intersections of race, socioeconomic status, language, and gender. ICM explores the intersections of language, socioeconomic status, and gender within a transborder lifestyle by focusing on the experiences of Transborder English Learner Latino Males (TELLM) in community colleges. TELLM students are the least likely of all racial and ethnic groups to transfer to a four-year college. Falcon, Harris III, and Leal (in-press) discuss in their study how “currently, societal institutions on both sides of the border do not recognize the existence of the transborder community in the region.” Falcon et al. (2017) also found TELLM students shared “experiences of invisibility and marginalization . . . [including] . . . a) Lack of On-campus Recognition, b) Lack of Understanding, c) Racism.” Nevertheless, transborder male participants identified positive faculty interactions as having “lasting impressions on their lives” (p. 2). Falcon et al.'s 2017 study suggests that educators can have a positive and critical impact on the academic trajectory of TELLM students.

In addition to transborder invisibility, TELLM’s are usually non-traditional students who leave college because they have additional responsibilities outside of school such as working full-time or caring for family (Wood, 2012, Wood & Palmer, 2011). The graduation rates for men of color are strikingly low in community college; only 32.1% and 30.2% of Black and Latino men will earn a certificate, degree or transfer within 6 years, compared to 39.8% of White and 43.4% of Asian men (BPS, 2009). The underperformance demonstrated by data has been misinterpreted by educators and school administrators as a deficiency that should be repaired (Flores & Rosa, 2015).

The ICM was designed to problematize deficit viewpoints by flipping the perspective from the "problem" of the student to the responsibility of the institution. By exploring students’ realities and perspectives, the ICM enables educators to interrogate their own deficit views.

The Problem 

Research by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2011 found that 26% of teachers across all grade levels had received professional development related to working with English language learners. Only 27% of the teachers who had received this professional development reported feeling well prepared to work with English language learner students. It is imperative to address this gap because past research findings on transborder Latino male students indicate the critical role educators play in students’ educational trajectories. We designed the ICM in an attempt to address this gap in teacher and administration staff reflection as it relates to TELLMs. The ICM positions educators as their students, which can be a powerful learning experience that improves teacher-student relationships.